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Saturday, 14 July 2012

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Review

If you’re
bored, and want something to do for a few hours...or days...or weeks...then Skyrim isn’t for you. This game will
undoubtedly take you months to see all it has to offer, and with solid combat,
responsive controls and a ridiculous amount of things to do, you should clear
your schedule, turn off your phone and get started, because Skyrim is here, and it’s one of the best
RPGs of all time.

If I tried
to tell you everything that there is to do in this game, I would literally
spend most of the day writing about it. From the first time you open the map,
you will see how expansive it actually is. Anyone who’s played Fallout 3 knows what to expect from
Bethesda, but the entirety of Fallout 3 could
be contained in a corner of the Skyrim
map. There are hundreds of caves, dungeons, ruins, villages, and more to
investigate and explore, all with their own look, history and treasures to
find. There are also side-quests and questlines. Side-quests can be taken from
anyone, and questlines work like factions. You join a group of people and do
specific quests for them. Joining these ‘factions’ will allow you to gain
unique items, and just supply some pretty cool quests.

All of this
is aside from the main story. Unfortunately, this isn’t very long. The
narrative is quite basic, yet interesting. Dragons are returning to Skyrim.
They are being resurrected by Alduin. A badass dragon who wants dragons to
reclaim the Earth, and as a Dragonborn, it’s your job to stop him. As I said
before, the main storyline isn’t very long, and if you just play to complete
the story, you can be finished in about a half hour. That’s because the main
focus of Skyrim isn’t the main story,
it’s everything else. To take in all that Skyrim
has, you will need to clear a schedule for about a month. There are also a
number of dragons to slay. Some have designated places and some appear randomly.
No matter how many I killed, I still got the feeling of excitement when I saw
one flying around in the distance, and I would always diverge from my current
quest to go and hunt it down. Killing dragons earns you their soul (and a few
other goodies to be picked from the corpse). You use dragon souls to unlock
shouts. Shouts are words of power from the Dragon language that you tend to
find in the dragon’s nests (although they are scattered around other places as
well). Each shout has a different effect, and each effect has 3 words to find.
Each word makes the shout stronger and you need one dragon soul per word.
Shouts let you do anything from setting foes on fire, to freezing them, to
slowing down time, or sprinting, or disarming an enemy, and much more. There’s
just an insane amount of things to do in this game.

Graphically,
this game doesn’t make any breakthroughs. The character models look a little
stiff, and lip synching is generally dreadful, but ugly people pale in
comparison to the incredible beast designs. The range of creatures is quite
surprising, especially when you look at the level of detail that goes into each
one. The varied landscapes also look incredible. There’s a little pop-in and
screen tearing here and there, but travelling from snowy mountains, to
crumbling ruins, to towns that are teeming with characters to interact with
feels like you really are in a full world, rather than the sandbox games that
restrict you to a specific area.

These
designs are complimented by a positively stunning soundtrack, that can be both
beautiful and haunting at the same time. Each type of location has its own
music, and there is one particular piece that will have you looking to the
skies whenever you hear it. The voice acting is one of the lower points in this game. With hundreds of characters to interact with and only a cast of about five or six voice actors, re-used again, and again, and again, you quickly get bored of the same voices everywhere you go, and I couldn't help but wish that in a game this big, Bethesda could have hired more voices to play the roles.

The
gameplay is solid and a huge step up from Oblivion.
The ability to double-wield weapons makes you feel more deadly, and removes the
problem of choosing between two equally good weapons. You now also have spells
in weapon slots, rather than having them mapped to a separate button, which in
my opinion is a good thing. Now you don’t have to try and fiddle with the
controller to get it to do what you want. You also have two-handed weapons,
bows, shields and wards. The wide range of weapons and abilities allows the
player a large choice over how they want to play. The levelling up works much
the same as Oblivion, by performing
certain actions, your skill values increase, and when enough skills have
increased, your character levels up. However, Skyrim’s levelling system requires more thought into what you do.
For example, you can’t just run across a field to raise your athletics level.
You actually need to do something useful to increase the skill.

Anyone with
experience in Bethesda’s large scale RPGs should expect that Skyrim would be riddled with bugs and
glitches. The abundance of problems that arise really gets tedious and
irritating, and when they appear in a game that is otherwise outstanding, they
really stand out. Some bugs even prevent you from completing quests, such as
the death of characters too early on, or the fact that some characters don’t
appear at all. Then, due to the unfinished quest, it is impossible to remove
quest items from your inventory, meaning you have to carry them around with
you, weighing you down.

There’s
also the issue of the dumb AI. Enemies that won’t move to avoid your attacks
lead to easy and occasionally unsatisfying victories, and companions that
charge into a group of enemies when you’re trying to be stealthy, kill somebody
who could easily have been paid off, or blunder madly into traps. They also
move in front of your attacks, leading you to kill them accidentally, and when
you’ve packed the with things that you couldn’t carry, you get left with a
tough choice. Leave the body and everything on it, or retrieve everything you
trusted them with, and walk slowly back towards a safe place to store or sell
them. Either way, this does get irritating.

Skyrim is
an incredible game. 30 hours in and you’ll barely have scratched the surface.
There’s enough to keep you occupied for an insane amount of time, and wide
variety of creatures, locations and play styles will keep the game from getting
repetitive. However, dumb AI and a number of technical issues crop up around
each turn, and really pull down the game’s amazing highs. However, a few
glitches and bugs should not hold you back from buying this title.